It looks like Microsoft Research is having a lot of fun with cameras these days. Not only have they stabilized your unusable GoPro footage and made something awesome with it, now they’re transforming your smartphone into a full-fledged Kinect.

Microsoft has been working on ways to make any regular 2D camera capture depth, meaning it could do some of the same things a Kinect does. As you can see in the video below the team managed to pull this off and we might see this tech all around in the near future.

What’s really impressive is that this works with many types of cameras. The research team used a smartphone as well as a regular webcam and both managed to achieve some impressive results. Of course the cameras have to be slightly modified but that's only to permit more IR light to hit the sensor.

Considering cameras are basically in every device nowadays and the modifications needed are tiny it’s not hard to imagine a future where users will have the option to control all of their devices via gesture-based commands.